Posts Tagged «microsoft research»

The indexes of competitors like Yahoo and Bing (around 15 billion pages each) are still only half as large as Google. To close this gap, Microsoft has pioneered new technologies to make web crawling more efficient.

At Siggraph 2014, Microsoft Research has unveiled Hyperlapse, an ingenious algorithm that will actually make you want to watch first-person GoPro footage. Hyperlapse scans through hours of video footage, reconstructs the physical path that you took in 3D, and then generates a super-smooth 10x-speed hyperlapse video that is immensely watchable (it’s a lot like a video game, in fact). Really, watch the videos below – I guarantee they’ll be the coolest thing you see today.

Microsoft has unveiled Project Adam, its new artificial intelligence that it claims is 50 times faster than comparable state-of-the-art systems deployed by the likes of Google. Adam can look at an image of almost anything and tell you exactly what it is; it can even differentiate between a Pembroke and Cardigan corgi. Notably, while similar AIs are moving to massively parallel GPU computing, Adam uses plain old CPUs in Microsoft’s Azure cloud — an impressive feat that is only possible thanks to Microsoft’s use of lock-free Hogwild! computing.

At the inaugural Code Conference in California, CEO Satya Nadella has revealed that Microsoft’s real-time speech translation technology will finally make the jump from the mystical, bottomless pit of its R&D department to a consumer product: Skype. On stage at the conference, Nadella demoed a beta version of Skype Translator, which performed real-time translation of English to German speech, and vice versa. Skype Translator isn’t perfect, but it’s tantalizingly close to the creation of a Star Trek-like universal translator — or Babel fish if you prefer — that allows everyone in the world to communicate, even if they don’t share a common language.

Siggraph 2014, probably the world’s most prestigious computer graphics (CG) convention, is almost upon us — and once again, it’s time to feast our eyes on the various next-gen CG technologies and techniques that are coming down the pipe. As always, Disney Research will be one of the most active participants, presenting a bunch of papers detailing myriad innovative ways of tearing, animating, and melting cute animals, but Microsoft Research and most of the world’s top universities will also be present to demonstrate their latest CG findings.

Ever since Nintendo’s Wii, gesture and motion control have, more or less, gotten a bad rap. Microsoft’s Kinect didn’t help the matter, as users soon realized that it requires much less effort to press a button on a controller than it does to wildly wave your arm in the air. Microsoft Research has seemingly learned from its past, and has developed a device that aims to make gesture control require much less effort.

Microsoft, clearly a bit jealous of the gratuitous geeky kudos being mopped up by Google X, has set up its own secretive Special Projects group. The group is being headed up by Norman Whitaker, previously a deputy director at DARPA. Not much is known about the Special Projects group, but a job listing says it will be tasked with “working on disruptive technologies that could benefit the company and society.” So far, Microsoft has declined to officially comment on this new group — presumably it’s waiting for a big New York Times expose, just like Google X.

Have you ever ended up on one of those awful websites where the text is saved as an image, preventing you from selecting or copying it? Or maybe you want to share the text from a comic, screenshot, or meme without painstakingly transcribing it? Now, with the Project Naptha browser extension, you can use your mouse to select the rasterized text from any image that you find on the web, and then paste that text elsewhere. You can also select the text and translate it into another language, or attempt to remove the text entirely,

When Blaise Aguera y Arcas (then of Microsoft Research, but now at Google) demonstrated Photosynth at TED 2007, it became an immediate hit and has since become one of the most-watched and discussed tech demos of all time. While the original iteration of Photosynth was certainly cool, the new version — Photosynth 3D — will blow your mind.

Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Copyright 1996-2015 Ziff Davis, LLC.PCMag Digital Group All Rights Reserved. ExtremeTech is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis, LLC. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis, LLC. is prohibited.